Star Bolshoi ballet dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko arrives at a court in Moscow to be sentenced for his part in an acid attack on the company's artistic director Sergei Filin

A Moscow court has delivered few surprises today in delivering a verdict on the three men charged with carrying out the horrific acid attack on Sergei Filin, the Bolshoi ballet’s artistic director. The hitman Yuri Zarutsky, his driver Andrei Lipatov, and the dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko, who ordered the attack, have all been found guilty.

Supporters of Dmitrichenko may feel relief that the dancer has been spared the full nine-year sentence demanded by the prosecution. Soon after the attack first happened, many signed a petition in support Dmitrichenko’s claim that he’d never intended so violent an assault to take place, and that his first “confession” to the police had been beaten out of him. But despite his culpability, six years in a penal colony is surely a tragic outcome for a man who seems to have tangled with forces far more complex and corrupt than he knew.

During the trial, the hitman Zurutsky spoke with cheerful insouciance of his intention to milk the “naïve good, young man” who had first approached him to "rough up Filin". Beyond the fee he charged, Zarutksy planned to press Dmitrichenko for various favours, including getting free passes to the theatre and a place for his daughter in ballet school. He certainly supported the dancer’s story that acid hadn’t been mentioned. That had been Zarutsky’s own idea, because, as he chillingly commented, more conventional physical force would have been messier and he might have gone too far.

Meanwhile Dmitrichenko himself has never wavered in his insistence that while the attack went terribly beyond what he planned, his motives were for the greater good. A union representative, supporting dancers who felt they were treated unfairly in the matter of casting and payments, Dmitchenko seems to have believed it was necessary to give Filin a fright, in order to make him realise the force of dissatisfaction within the company.

The Bolshoi is a huge institution, and one that’s rife with factionalism and competition. Not only do its 200 dancers have to fight harder for recognition and roles than they would in a smaller company, but that fight becomes even more urgent given the inequitable payment system, by which dancers' earnings (starting at barely subsistence level for the juniors) are pinned to the number of performances they give.

In marked contrast were the many dancers who insisted on coming to court to refute all those accusations: denying any suggestion of sexual wrongdoing (Smirnova is married to the son of one of Filin’s close associates), and pointing out that Filin had constantly suffered from blatant insubordination and undermining by both Tsiskardize and Dmitrichenko (whose own girlfriend was one of the dancers who'd felt overlooked by the artistic director).

Fascinating testimony also came from former company manager Ruslan Pronin – who, despite feeling that Dmitrichenko had been mispresented in the affair, said that the dancer had felt himself untouchable, able to say what he liked to Filin because he felt himself to be under the protection of Yuri Grigorovich – the longtime Soviet director of the Bolshoi whose influence has remained potent in the company as a bulwark against the modernising, westernising trends of Filin, his predecessor Alexei Ratmanksy and former general director of the Bolshoi, Anatoly Iksanov.

Again it’s the size of the Bolshoi that seems to give space and fuel to these intense differences. Also its status as a key political and cultural symbol in Russia.

Westerners sometimes find it hard to comprehend that ballet can have such a life-and-death significance as it does in Russia. Yet one particular detail of this trial underlines how much we are outsiders, looking into a very foreign world. At the end of his statement to the court, Yuri Zarutsky apologised directly to Filin – and said he would be happy to offer him his “services” when he was eventually released from prison.